Syria

Re "No credibility, no trust," and "Credibility shouldn't be a factor," Opinion, Sept. 5 Benny Morris misconstrues President Obama's deliberative approach in seeking the appropriate response to Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons as a sign of indecision and political weakness. He attempts to extend this mistaken conclusion regarding the president's cautious approach to the Iranian nuclear problem. Morris' flawed argument serves as a classic illustration of what Rajan Menon, in his opposing Op-Ed article, calls the "credibility gambit.

Some 6,000 refugees pour out of Syria every day, straining humanitarian aid resources and destabilizing the country's neighbors. Cumulatively, they already make up 10% of the population of Jordan. And there is no end in sight. Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, says the displacement of people has not risen "at such a frightening rate" since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The absolute size of the humanitarian catastrophe may not yet match the largest of recent times, such as the 2010 floods in Pakistan, but Syria is working hard to catch up. Moreover, its political effects are potentially far greater than those of any tsunami or earthquake.

Here's how feeble U.S. influence on the outcome of Syria's dreadful civil war has become: For the Obama administration's diplomacy to succeed, it now needs help from an armed group with the unpromising name of the Islamic Front. That wasn't where the administration hoped to be. When President Obama first got interested in Syria back in 2011, his hope was that a popular uprising just needed a little moral support from the outside world to topple the brutal regime of Bashar Assad. When that didn't work, Obama offered modest, mostly non-military aid to moderate groups in the Syrian opposition, enough to raise their hopes but not enough to ensure success on the battlefield.

President Obama appears increasingly ready to launch a military strike in response to Syrian President Bashar Assad's apparent use of chemical weapons against civilians. But the goal won't be to topple the Assad government, even though Obama has wanted that outcome for more than two years. Instead, White House officials say, the goal will be more limited: deterrence. The strikes will be aimed primarily at deterring Assad from using chemical weapons again. But there are other kinds of deterrence Obama is hoping for too. PHOTOS: Portraits of Syrian rebels He hopes to deter other adversaries, especially Iran, from concluding that he doesn't mean it when he proclaims a "red line," as he did on chemical weapons in Syria last year.

Books can start wars, or shape how they are fought. Abraham Lincoln famously told Harriet Beecher Stowe that her book, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” started the Civil War. In the 1990s, two books helped inform the policies of President Clinton in the Balkans. Robert D. Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History" portrayed many centuries of irreconcilable ethnic enmity and gave the impression of a morass that would swallow up any country that intervened there; David Remnick of the New Yorker called it a “marvelous alibi for inaction.” But later Clinton read Noel Malcolm's "Bosnia: A Short History," which portrayed the conflict in that country as the product of the Machiavellian political calculations of Slobodan Milosevic.

Re "A moral and legal test for Obama," Aug. 28 U.S. officials are claiming they have irrefutable evidence of a poison gas attack against civilians in Syria. Trade those words for something like "convinced that there are weapons of mass destruction. " Ring any bells? Kim Righetti Upland ALSO: Mailbag: Syria -- to strike or not to strike Letters: Egypt's choices and U.S. options Letters: iPads won't cure what ails LAUSD

In the third year of fighting that has claimed close to 100,000 lives, the children of Syria are suffering unspeakable horrors and growing up illiterate and angry. That was the warning delivered Thursday by the United Nations' special representative for children and armed conflict. Leila Zerrougui, in Beirut after a three-day visit to Syria's grim refugee camps and shattered communities, told U.N. colleagues and journalists that the normal pursuits of childhood - school, play and family life - have become casualties of the fighting between rebels and the forces loyal to President Bashar Assad.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey - The Syrian government has met an international deadline to submit a detailed declaration of its chemical weapons facilities and a plan to destroy the nation's toxic arsenal, the group overseeing the disarmament process said Sunday. Syria had until Sunday to present its declaration and the related proposal for destruction to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based organization supervising the elimination of Syria's chemical stockpiles.

BEIRUT -- Syria was plunged into Internet darkness for more than 19 hours, the second electronic blackout in six months for the strife-ridden nation. The shutdown, first reported about 9:45 p.m. Tuesday, fed opposition suspicions of a deliberate government operation, perhaps aimed at masking a coming offensive, or to stymie communications among rebel units fighting to oust President Bashar Assad. "This is a sign of the regime's weakness and that it is running out of cards to play," said a representative of the Liwa al-Islam Brigade, a major rebel unit inside Syria.

JERUSALEM - With three air strikes on targets in Syria since January, Israel is inserting itself into the Arab Spring's most intractable conflict, heightening fears that the civil war could spiral into a regional conflagration. But as some quietly confirmed Israel's involvement in Sunday's attack against a Syrian weapons facility outside Damascus, Israeli officials insisted their goals in Syria are narrow, and portrayed the engagement as defensive and largely unrelated to the fighting between rebel groups and the regime of President Bashar Assad.